Mastodawn

May you live in interesting times... https://no01.substack.com/p/march-19-21-god-is-a-comedian Three weeks into the Iran war, reality has passed through the looking glass, out the other side, and is now selling tickets to the gift shop. What follows is not satire. Satire requires exaggeration, and you cannot exaggerate something that is already operating at maximum absurdity. This is simply the news, and nothing but the news. Told straight, in a universe that has clearly stopped taking its medication.

March, 19-21: God is a comedian

A stiff drink is recommended

Gold and Geopolitics

Martin Roukala (né Peres)4d ago

bunnie 4d ago

One of my favorite features of the Baochip-1x is the BIO. It's an I/O coprocessor that is based on the PicoRV32, with custom register extensions to allow direct access to GPIOs from the ISA.

Read more about the BIO at this blog post: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2026/bio-the-bao-i-o-coprocessor/ I go in-depth into the architecture and its trade-offs relative to the PIO, and conclude by working through a couple of coding examples.

Martin Roukala (né Peres)5d ago

EDIT: don't take this particular post as the whole truth, just illustration: https://lobste.rs/s/funkm6/why_i_m_not_collaborating_with_kenneth

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-18-open_source_gave_me_everything_until_i_had_nothing_left_to_give hurts so much to read...

We may not know each other, but if you are a maintainer of a project (open source or not), let it be yet another cautionary tale of the uncomfortable truth: No-one should sacrifice their health for their craft!

Too many people in our community end up burning out, or even taking their own lives... this *has* *to* *stop*!

* Yes, please take pride in your work, but don't tie your identity to it! Building a *trusted* community of contributors is even more fun anyway.

* Yes, listen to your community, but don't make yourself responsible for the success of the project!

I really would like to see @sima's attempt from 2017 at a Maintainer’s Manifest come to fruition and get widely applied: https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/01/maintainers-dont-scale.html . I certainly am very grateful for having been exposed to her warnings and recommendation. It definitely made my burnout way less severe than it could have been (even then, I will never be the same again, for better and worse), and pushed me deeper into building testing automation to make reviews less painful for everyone while also increasing quality!

Why I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz

58 comments

Lobsters

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 17

Clayton Mar 17

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@postmarketOS/116245241828987608

what I've been working on for the last year 🥳

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 17

Lynne Mar 16

FFmpeg 8.1 just got released! I wrote a piece about the Vulkan compute codecs for the Khronos blog:
https://www.khronos.org/blog/video-encoding-and-decoding-with-vulkan-compute-shaders-in-ffmpeg

Video Encoding and Decoding with Vulkan Compute Shaders in FFmpeg

In this blog we explore how FFmpeg uses Vulkan Compute to seamlessly accelerate encoding and decoding of even professional-grade video on consumer GPUs — unlocking GPU compute parallelism at scale, without specialized hardware. This approach complements Vulkan Video's fixed-function codec support, extending acceleration to formats and workflows it doesn't cover.

The Khronos Group

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 16

Justin du Coeur Mar 15

Oh, this is neat. The maker of myNoise.net (best background-noise generator, bar none -- super-highly recommended) has been frustrated by the problem of negotiating prices. For many of us, haggling is one of the most awful possible experiences.

So he went and wrote a tool for it. Not trying to be super-fancy, not trying to be perfect, just a tool to come up with a reasonable, fair price with a minimum of effort.

Hence, BidWix: https://bidwix.com -- no accounts, no spyware, just a nearly-trivial, free online tool to help two parties find a fair price. More info at https://bidwix.com/articles/

Sounds useful, and it's from a source I trust -- worth checking out!

The fast, fair way to agree on a price — BidWix

One-shot negotiation without back-and-forth. A bargaining mechanism where honesty is your best strategy.

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 15

R Mar 15

So, I recently saw some quiet discussion about a paper where researchers reverse-engineered and disclosed some attacks against PhotoDNA, the very-super-duper-secret algorithm used by tech megacorps to scan for illegal images.

They didn't make any code public, and so... I did: https://github.com/ArcaneNibble/open-alleged-photodna

A _complete_ reverse-engineering and commented Python reimplementation of the algorithm from publicly-leaked binaries.

This means that studying the algorithm and any potential flaws is now much more accessible.

This took only about two days (once I knew that there even _was_ a leaked binary to compare against), which just goes to again show that security through obscurity never works.

🔁 encouraged

GitHub - ArcaneNibble/open-alleged-photodna: because research belongs to _everybody_

because research belongs to _everybody_. Contribute to ArcaneNibble/open-alleged-photodna development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 14

unfa🇺🇦Mar 14

Android is on the track to become closed down like iOS is. We need to do somethibg about it. Here's why and how:
https://keepandroidopen.org/
#keepandroidopen #android #freedom #smartphones #foss #software

Keep Android Open

Advocating for Android as a free, open platform for everyone to build apps on.

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 14

KDE Mar 14

"This Week in Plasma" brings the news that...

You can use long-presses on your regular keyboard to access alternative glyphs—just like on your phone, e.g. press and hold down [$] and a popup appears that let's you choose between €, £, ¥, ¢, ₹. Also new is that you can download and install alternative sound themes and that we reduced CPU and GPU load for full-screen windows on screens using more fractional scale factors, and much more!

https://blogs.kde.org/2026/03/14/this-week-in-plasma-press-and-hold-for-alternative-characters/

#desktop #FreeSoftware #openSource

Martin Roukala (né Peres)Mar 13

Carl Schwan

Mar 13

It’s now possible to access files in S3 (or any compatible services) with Dolphin and other @kde apps! We just released the first version of KIO S3, which bridges S3 with all KIO-powered apps.

https://blogs.kde.org/2026/03/13/introducing-kio-s3/

#kde #linux #s3

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